Sunday, October 02, 2005

Still one thing

I promised I'd stop this blabbering. But I remembered that I was thinking about whether film noir was mutated into the experiments of off-Hollywood films, such as Ben Maddow's and Joseph Strick's The Savage Eye. Today I browsed through some pages of James Naremore's excellent and truly recommendable More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts and came across the term "art-house noir". With this Naremore means films like Kubrick's Killer's Kiss and Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (which I haven't seen myself, I'm sorry to say). They are somewhat experimental and yet recognizably crime movies and thrillers, but it was nice to note that I'm not the only one thinking about these matters.

I was also delighted to see that Naremore quoted someone who said that film noir belonged to a larger cultural pattern that included also abstract expressionist paintings by ones like Jackson Pollock. It's an interesting thought and one that I've been thinking about: there are so many examples of noirness in the fourties', fifties' and sixties' America that you can't help but say: it really did exist and it must've had its reasons to be born.

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